Recent Articles

• History Repeats: The Big Data Revolution in Telecom Service Assurance — interview with Olav Tjelflaat — The lessons of telecom software history teach that new networks and unforeseen industry developments have an uncanny knack for disrupting business plans.  A service assurance incumbent reveals its strategy for becoming a leader in the emerging network analytics and assurance market.
• From Alarms to Analytics: The Paradigm Shift in Service Assurance — interview with Kelvin Hall — In a telecom world with millions of smart devices, the service assurance solutions of yesteryear are not getting the job done.  So alarm-heavy assurance is now shifting to big data solutions that deliver visual, multi-layered, and fine-grained views of network issues.  A data architect who works at large carriers provides an inside view of the key service provider problems driving this analytics shift.
• Why Deep Packet Inspection Analysis is Essential for Detecting IP Fraud — by Dror Eshet — The IP and mobile broadband revolution is in full swing: time for fraud managers to totally rethink their existing controls and areas of exposure.  In this article, a fraud expert discusses the power of DPI technology and the key impact its analysis is having in an FM world where knowing what’s inside the packets is as important as figuring out where those IP packages are going.
• Revenue Assurance: History and New Beginnings in RA Maturity — interview with Daniela Giacomantonio & Gadi Solotorevsky — The Roman Forum was the center of commercial life in ancient Rome.  Now, two millennia later, the Forum lives on in the exchange of ideas across countless professions and  media.  In this interview, two Revenue Assurance experts discuss both the new RA Maturity initiative of the TM Forum and the value of telco/solution vendor collaboration.
• Migrating systems or launching LTE next year?  Don‘t forget transformation assurance & optimisation — by Efrat Nissimov — System transformations and network migrations are major  revenue impacting events and they should raise a big red flag.  Why?  Because data integrity issues are bound to crop up as CSPs move vital data from a legacy system to something new.  It’s time for transformation assurance.
• Flexibility & Fraud Management Systems: 8 Questions for Luke Taylor of Neural Technologies — interview with Luke Taylor — Meeting today’s fraud threats is not just about technology, but also the speed of threat detection, the scanning of data outliers, and being enormously flexible.  A leading fraud management vendor takes a bead on current FM issues and points to where software is headed.
• Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems.  This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
• How can Cable/DSL Internet Providers Meet the Usage-Based Billing Mandate? — interview with Ryan Guthrie — The popularity of YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu other video outlets has turned the tables on service profitability for cable/DSL service providers.  Many are moving to usage-based billing, but that largely unprepared for the revenue assurance aspects of this move.  This interview explains the technical challenge and points to solutions in billing, speed caps, and traffic revenue monitoring.
• The Shrink-Wrapped Search Engine: Why It’s Becoming a Vital Tool in Telecom Analytics — interview with Tapan Bhatt — Google invented low cost, big data computing with its distributed search engine that lives in mammoth data centers populated with thousands of commodity CPUs and disks.  Now search engine technology is available as “shrink wrapped” enterprise software.  This article explains how this new technology is solving telecom analytics problems large and small.
• Sharing Intelligence, Services, and Infrastructure across the Telecom Galaxy — interview with Gary Zimmerman — The telecom industry is an industry of sharing.  In fact, the rise of mobile broadband is driving a greater reliance on real-time intelligence, services trading, and infrastructure exchange.  In this article, a leading info exchange provider explains the value of its services portfolio and points to other interoperability and sharing ideas under development.
• Data Monetization: Why Selling Intelligence is a Hot New Revenue Stream for Mobile Carriers — interview with Joe Levy — Data monetization is a revenue dream come true for mobile carriers: a highly profitable sideshow where the carrier analyzes and sells data it already collects for other purposes.  In this article you’ll learn how operators monetize their data through use cases in corporate advertising and media branding.
• The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers.  But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process.  This white paper points to a solution -- a collaborative solution designs system -- and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
• Harvesting Big Data Riches in Retailer Partnering, Actionable CEM & Network Optimization — interview with Oded Ringer — In the analytics market there’s plenty of room for small solution firms to add value through a turnkey service or cloud/licensed solution.  But what about large services firms: where do they play?  In this article you’ll learn how a global services giant leverages data of different types to help telcos: monetize retail partnerships, optimize networks, and make CEM actionable.
• Special Report: Wholesale Systems for Advanced Services — by Dan Baker — Plenty of technology and market changes are disrupting the telecom wholesale market: advanced services, new kinds of partners,,and the need to monitor relationships and services more closely than was ever required in the circuit voice world.  This article introduces a TRI special report discussing the kind of Wholesale Systems needed in this challenging marketplace.
• Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation.  This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings.  The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
• When Big Data is Too Big: The Value of Real-Time Filtering and Formatting — interview with Rick Aguirre — The volume of telecom network traffic is often so huge it outstrips the ability of even “big data” engines to analyze it fast enough.  In this article, you’ll learn about a business that filters and formats very large data sets and delivers the relevant data for applications like: data monetization, network optimization, network peering monitoring, and unstructured data storage.
• Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds.  Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
• Raising a Telco’s Value in the Digital Ecosystem: One Use Case at a Time — interview with Jonathon Gordon — The speed of telecom innovation is forcing software vendors to radically adapt and transform their business models.  This article shows how a deep packet inspection company has  expanded into revenue generation, particularly  for mobile operators.  It offers a broad palette of value-adding use cases from video caching and parental controls to application-charging and DDoS security protection.
• Radio Access Network Data: Why It’s Become An Immensely Useful Analytics Source — interview with Neil Coleman — It’s hard to overstate the importance of Radio Access Network (RAN) analytics to a mobile operator’s business these days.  This article explains why the RAN data, which lives in the air interface between the base station and the handset --  can be used for a business benefit in network optimization and customer experience.
• CABS Revenue Assurance: How Rural LECs can Recover $284 Million in Revenue Shortfalls — interview with Kelly Cannon & Darrell Merschak — Independent rural LECs in the U.S. still rely on the AMA/EMI billing formats for CABS billing, even as that format has proven to be highly inaccurate as a source of inter-carrier records.  This interview includes an analysis and discussion of revenue recovery techniques ILECs can use by leveraging SS7 probes.  Also discussed are billing strategies, traffic dumping threats, and the possible fallout from the FCC’s bill-and-keep mandate.